Tuesday, August 30, 2011

How To Make a Strong and Safe Password

Nobody wants to get hacked. But when it comes to choosing a password, there are key steps you can take to reduce your risk of data intrusions from unwanted virtual visitors. This week's edition of Upgrade Your Life will teach you how to make a strong, safe password that's easy to remember — and how to reduce your odds of being an easy target for hackers.

Worst Passwords

In 2009, a major hack on social gaming site RockYou revealed some troubling patterns in how we choose our passwords. The Imperva Application Defense Center (ADC), a security research group, examined the passwords of RockYou's clients to see just what went wrong. The study found that more than 29,000 of the compromised accounts were using the password "123456" — the most popular password. The second and third most common passwords were also strings of consecutive numbers. And the fourth most common password? "Password." Other popular passwords from the RockYou case include "iloveyou," "abc123," and a handful of common first names like "Ashley" and "Michael."

How to avoid bad passwords:

Don't use any part of your name or email address: These two pieces of information are easily obtained about you.

Avoid any other personal information: Don't use your birthday, family member or pet names, street addresses, or anything else that could be public knowledge for prying eyes.

Don't use consecutive numbers: These are extremely easy for a cracking program to decode, and as you can see from the ADC study, they're also wildly popular.

Avoid words in the dictionary: This includes random sequences of words and slang terms too.

Best Passwords: Uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols

Nowadays, many websites encourage good password practices by forcing you to input a mix of numbers, letters, symbols, and mixed capitalization. This approach is definitely the right idea: mixing it up can pay off, statistically speaking. Why? Most password hacks you'll be warding off use a technique called a "brute force attack." This flavor of hack uses automated computer software to guess every possible combination to crack your personal code.

According to the ADC study, automated hacking software combined with poorly chosen passwords means a hacker can break into 1000 accounts in just 17 minutes. If you introduce more variables into your password — namely numbers, symbols, and a mix of lower and upper case letters — intrusive software will take longer to crack your code.

Make passwords more secure:

Add letters: Since there are 26 letters in the alphabet, one additional letter can make your password 26 times harder to crack.

Use a mix of lower and uppercase letters: Mixing up your cases adds complexity and safety to your chosen password.

Add numbers: Using letters, words, and phrases for your passwords seems both natural and easy to remember, but it's much safer to diversify.

Add symbols: Symbols are the real secret ingredient to security. Since there are over 1500 symbols a hacking program needs to run through to correctly lock down one character of your password, adding one extra asterisk or exclamation point can make it 1500 times more difficult for intruders to pry open your personal accounts.

Password length = Password strength

Most websites prompt you to create a code with a minimum and maximum amount of characters, often between 8 and 14. Since each additional character increases your odds of staying safe, be sure to max out the length of your password. If you can enter 14 characters, don't stop at 10 — those extra 4 characters will work to your statistical advantage.

Sure m00se44 might be faster to type, but m00se44!.!.!.! is a far safer bet. How much safer? According to a handy online brute force simulator, hackers could crack m00se44 in less than a second. What about m00se44!.!.!.!? Assuming that the hacking software is guessing one hundred billion combinations a second, believe it or not, it could take the same software almost 200,000 centuries to crack it.

Password padding: Symbols are your secret weapon

Much of the basis for this article comes from the research of a noted security expert named Steve Gibson. His most recent practical advice involves a simple technique called "password padding." It used to be that a random password like Pr5^w4''t3F was perceived to be the best password. But the reality is that people can't actually remember those totally random passwords, so they don't end up using or sticking with them.

To solve this dilemma, Gibson wanted to create a memorable password strategy that would be equally secure. He stumbled onto the idea that long passwords loaded with symbols can be both ultra-secure and yet also easily memorized. He came up with the following example to prove his point.

Which of these is easier to remember? Which is more secure?

D0g!(!(!(!(!(!

PrXyc5NFn4k77

The more memorable password is D0g!(!(!(!(!(! since it looks like the familiar word "dog" and ends with a repeating pattern of symbols. And according to Gibson, D0g!(!(!(!(!(! is also the more secure password because, while it too has numbers, letters (upper and lowercase), and symbols, the first example is one character longer than the random second password — and it has more symbols.

Want to see this effect in action? Play around with Gibson's password security calculator yourself.

Store passwords in one place with a password manager

If you're a little concerned about juggling all of the lengthy, ultra-secure passwords you've dreamed up, you can have a program do the heavy lifting. These programs and apps, known as password wallets or password managers, lock down your cache of codes by encrypting them, which translates them into a secure language that hackers can't parse. If RockYou's data had been encrypted, that security scandal could have been avoided altogether.

While no method is infallible, well-regarded password managers like LastPass and 1Password are great options. With a password manager, you'll use a master password to access the program or app, and it will auto-fill password entry fields for you as you log in around the web. Both LastPass and 1Password feature mobile and desktop versions, so you can keep both computer and your phone locked down safely.

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